Happy to announce our MLA session for January 2025 in New Orleans:
“Transnational Byron”
Session Chair, Piya Pal-Lapinski, Associate Professor of English, Bowling Green State University
Byron’s experiences in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, including the global impact of his poetry, position him uniquely as a transnational figure. This panel explores transnational contexts in Byron’s work and discusses the significance of these interventions in an increasingly fractured global scenario which marks the current moment. Offering fresh interpretations of major works, the session focuses on topics such as Byron’s global celebrity; the way The Island frames political revolution in the context of the Columbian, Ecuadorian, and Greek revolts, creating spaces for new ideas related to progressive political communities, asylum and refugee discourse; Don Juan as an epic of child migration which engages with the nightmarish precarity of the migrant situation, from shipwreck and sexual exploitation to slavery; and the way Byron’s translating activity unsettles the idea of a national language/culture, drawing attention to difference and forging new coalitions.
Participants:
Mark Canuel, “Byron’s ‘Infant World,’” Professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago
Omar Miranda, “Byron’s Global Celebrity,” Associate Professor of English, University of San Francisco
Jonathan Sachs, “Don Juan’s Migrant Children,” Professor of English, Concordia University, Montréal
Maria Schoina, “Byron as Translator,” Associate Professor, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
